Cosmetic foot surgery: a tale right from the Brothers Grimm

If it happened in Afghanistan we'd call it barbaric. In the West we call it fashion, writes Adele Horin.

Women put their faces under the knife in the name of beauty. So why should I be surprised to learn women have begun to lop off bits of their toes in the same cause?

It was as gruesome as any tale you would find in Grimm. The small item from The New York Times reported on the trend in cosmetic foot surgery.

With shoes achieving iconic status, women are resorting to desperate measures to squeeze into the latest pointy-toed, towering stiletto. "Critics simply do not understand the importance of high heels," the story quoted advocates of the practice as saying.

If it happened in Afghanistan we'd call it barbaric. When it happens in a rich Western country, it is called fashion.

It is not known how many women have had their feet reshaped to fit the new styles. But how-to stories have appeared in women's magazines and orthopedic surgeons in the US are warning about permanent disability.

People look back on foot binding in 10th-century China as a crime against women. Superstition, patriarchy and a macabre sense of the beautiful, namely a 7.5-centimetre foot, were responsible for inflicting pain and deformities on generations of Chinese women.

Now the culprits are shoe designers Manolo Blahnik and Jimmy Choo, and their cut-price imitators.

This is the season to take time off and catch up on popular trends, like DVDs of Sex and the City, a TV program about shoe fetishists, and the return of the suicidal stiletto.

It's been 50 years since the stiletto ruled. For decades women padded about happily in Doc Martens and Birkenstocks, pumps and sensible heels. I know I did, even though I needed the height. American women even wore jogging shoes when they visited Paris, though the rest of us knew better.

Then along came Blahnik and Choo, creators of shoes as tall as polished skyscrapers. And these sadists are revered as fashion gods; these cobblers are viewed as artists; these misogynists are regarded as gifts to women.

Arrow-tipped and lethal, their creations are supposed to be sexy, seductive, flirtatious. They elongate dumpy legs. They make the most shapeless calf muscle appear taut. That is what the fashion writers say about extreme heels.

Well, maybe they do. I tried on a pair by cut-price imitators, and boy I looked tall. Gosh, was my calf elongated! My broad foot seemed almost dainty in the tiny triangular shoebox. For a moment, I felt flirtatious.

When I tried to walk, however, the illusion of sophistication evaporated. I teetered and tottered; I felt like a novice on stilts. You can't just wear stilettos. You have to master them.

Where can a woman go in such shoes? Not far. How fast can a woman travel in such shoes? Not very. How long can a woman stand still in them? It depends, I guess, on how long a woman is willing to suffer.

The men who design them do not wear them. The female president of Choo's empire road-tests all his 350 styles; Choo strides out in lace-ups. The shoes Blahnik wore to the recent opening of an exhibition of his "work" in New York were so unremarkable that no scribe mentioned them, though his white shirt, dark suit and silver hair attracted comment.

The Wall Street Journal reported recently on the boom in podiatry products created by the new fashion. Fashionistas are stampeding chemists in search of toe tonics, blister bandages, special inserts and other cures for tortured soles.

And then there is the toe-shortening and nail-narrowing surgery to allow fat feet to slip into pointy stilettos. "I think it's reprehensible for a physician to correct someone's feet so they can get into Jimmy Choo shoes," an orthopedic surgeon, Dr Sharon Dreeben, told The New York Times.

But a much-quoted podiatrist sees it as her professional duty to help a half-crippled woman back into her extreme heels: "Give her heels instead of flats and she'll suddenly get whistles on the street."

Surgery is not an original idea. In Grimm's account of Cinderella, the ugly stepsisters hacked bits off their feet in attempts to squeeze into the glass slipper.

The disabilities that can result from wearing super-heels have also been seen before. Joint deformities are the main problem formerly noted in Chinese women whose feet had been bound.

I don't want to be a spoilsport. Some people are shoe-mad and will suffer anything for their passion. Some are crazy about earrings. Others simply need to move fast through life. But the stiletto fashion seems to me like a backward step.

And why are they considered sexy? Is it more than the elongated calf? Can it be that women look a little vulnerable up there? As if they need help? Women in stilettos can barely traverse a large room without support. Flatties announce: "I stand on my own two feet, thanks." But a woman in stilettos definitely looks her best on the arm of a man.

As for me, summer holidays beckon. I can't wait to sink bare toes into the sand.